Focus on Usability is going to be a big trend in Portals and Content Management implementations. This follows from two main reasons:

More and more organizations are rationalizing and consolidating different sites and portals that had proliferated in the enterprise. Each of these have a different look & feel, navigation and a different user experience. Hence, it will be important to focus on usability in order to provide a consistent user experience.

Secondly, most of these products force you to follow a "design template" provided by the product. For example, almost all portal products let you choose a single column, 2-column or a similar template. It is certainly possible to have your own design but it is really difficult to actually implement it. Hence, the design is actually driven by what a product can (and can not) do rather than the other way round.